Spotlight and Trash on USB Drive

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How do you stop Trash and Spotlight from writing folders and files onto a USB Drive ? I isn to share files for Window users, but not that Spotlight writes what appears to be folders and files to the drive, which take up space that I wish to use. Is there any way to prevent this from happening ?
 

Cory Cooper

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Hello and welcome.

I don't know of any way to prevent Finder from writing these files, as it is part of the way the Mac OS works and keeps track of things. I understand your initiative, as I use several USB flash drives myself to go between Macs and PCs. The files really don't take up that much space at all, usually only about the size of a single page Word document in total, and are hidden by default.

My solution is to mount the flash drive in Windows within Parallels, and then delete the MAC files before unmounting it from there. This works well, especially when using the flash drives as a source for audio files in my hi-fi system...so I don't have to see these files in the browser.

C
 

Spawn_Dooley

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AFAIK, Tinkertool has a setting which could take care of the Spotlight files being written and there are apparently other 3rd party solutions to deal with the .Trashes files too, eg: Hidden Cleaner is one, if you don't have Parallels running.
 

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